JD.com Narrows Down Alibaba Lead In Market

Due to the slow growth of China economy and Alibaba's revenue growth, JD.com is performing quite well to close down on the lead in the market.

Alibaba Group Holding is all set to post its quarterly earnings in the coming days. According to Reuters, this will be the weakest quarterly revenue growth in history for the Chinese e-commerce giant in a long time. Analysts predict that this decline or slowdown of the company in the market will further ignite the rivalry with its direct domestic competitor JD.com.

Currently, the Chinese online shopping market is very tough and the constant downfall in country’s economy is causing troubles for the likes of Alibaba and JD.com etc. According to a Smart Estimate survey of 28 analysts by Reuters, it is believed that the revenue of Alibaba Group for the quarter ending December is expected to grow by 26.6% only which is said to be the slowest growth rate in its history.

Furthermore, analysts believe that this is the most sluggish rate since the company began publishing such data. During the same time, its domestic rival JD.com is projected a revenue growth of almost 47% to 51% despite of the lag it faced. The released records showed that the figure was also JD.com’s slowest rate since its inception in the market.

For now, both parties have declined to comment on the revenue growth matter. The chief executive of consumer intelligence company Bomoda, Brian Buchwald, said, “When the market starts to slow you start to have real winners and real losers. I think that they need to pay attention to their immediate competition.” This is quite true that the real challenge for any firm to show it really is outstanding is to perform when the market is slowed down.

At this moment, China economy is growing at its slowest pace since 2009 and is expected to get worse as time passes, but Alibaba is confident to keep up with the market pace as well as its domestic and international rivals in the region. Sources suggest that JD.com is targeting more ‘affluent’ and wealthy online shoppers that belong from bigger cities of China. This strategy of a small rival could be the breakthrough in a tougher economy.

Reuters reported that Alibaba was losing its major chunk of market share to JD.com. In the past nine months ending September, the total value of goods sold, commonly referred as gross merchandize volume (GMV), of the Chinese company rose by 34% only whereas JD.com managed to increase its numbers by a massive 82%.

At the beginning of 2016, CEO of Alibaba Group announced that the focus of the business would be to expand in the ‘first tier’ cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing. This came after it announced to push into the rural areas of China as well as in the foreign markets in the coming times.

An employee at a tech startup based in Beijing, Zoe Li, stated that JD.com is currently performing better than Alibaba in the region. On comparing both online retailers, she added, “They [JD.com] have faster shipping speeds, and the quality is more trustworthy”

Alibaba Joins Hands With Nvidia Corporation For Artificial Intelligence Development

Alibaba teams up with Nvidia to work on its cloud computing and artificial intelligence division.

According to sources, Alibaba Group Holding is said to be working on its cloud computing division in the coming times. Bloomberg reported that the Chinese tech giant would be teaming up with the American technology corporation, which is well known for manufacturing, designing, and selling graphics processing unit (GPU) and chips, Nvidia Corporation.

Both parties will be working together to bolster Alibaba’s cloud computing and artificial intelligence segment. Furthermore, it is believed that the company will be having at least 1,000 developers that will work on its big data platform in the upcoming years.

AliCloud is known as the cloud-computing arm of the biggest e-commerce operator of China. It suggested that the collaboration means to improve and further invest in data analysis and machine learning. AliCloud is putting $1 billion at stake with a perception that a boost will be observed in terms of processing and storage from governmental organizations and other companies in the coming decade. The ecommerce giant is trying its best to come at par and compete with Amazon in terms of cloud computing.

According to Bain & Co., “The investment also reflects Alibaba’s own appetite for information processing as China’s online-retail market grows to 10 trillion yuan ($1.5 billion) by 2020.” Alibaba Group is looking forward to making its move in the cloud-computing sector through AliCloud. It realizes that customers are offered software and services through remote data centers.

The datacenters of big tech companies are same as the size of American football fields. Hence, this forced the e-commerce giant to launch its second datacenter in the Silicon Valley in October and is now looking forward to working on its first datacenter in Europe.

AliCloud’s president, Simon Hu, stated in a presentation in Shanghai, “AliCloud’s rate of growth is one of the fastest among global peers. Apart from being fast-expanding in Asia, we will also maintain our growth in Europe and the Middle East.”

Bloomberg reported that AliCloud wants to expand its reach and do something beyond cloud computing services and solutions. The arm of China’s biggest e-commerce platform earns revenues by charging its clients a fee for using its services. It is believed that the business could soon generate $1 billion of Alibaba’s total revenue by the end of 2018.

AliCloud was previously known as Aliyun and it was said to be the next promising cloud computing infrastructure in the market due to exponential growth potential.

Amazon All Set To Launch Its Drone Delivery Service

Amazon is now aware of how its drones work and can soon be allowing customers to avail the service.

Amazon Inc. previously announced that it will be taking a major step forward in making shipments and deliveries faster for its customers. The firm launched its Prime loyalty program which offers free two day shipping. Apart from this, it also came up with one hour and two hour delivery program for its Prime members which gained immense traction among the masses. The company, back then, revealed regarding its drone delivery service and it is now on the verge to launching it after completing a series of tests.

Amazon wants to own and operate its own logistics department for which it is not only running fleet of trucks but hiring cargo jets as well. It already had drone delivery service in its pipeline which was going to drop your shopping order on door steps. After proper testing and experiments, the e-commerce giant has an idea of how large and heavy its drones will be. Furthermore, they are now well aware about the weight that they can carry on drones. There will be a limited weight of the products and the customers will have to order within the limit if they wish to avail the drone delivery service.

According to the vice president of global public policy at Amazon, Paul Misener, stated in an interview that the firm will be working to deliver orders and packages within the 30 minutes of the order being placed at the online marketplace. He added that Amazon is now well aware of the drone size, the weight that it can carry, and the distance it can cover. “       The goals we've set for ourselves are: The range has to be over 10 miles. These things will weigh about 55 pounds each, but they'll be able to deliver parcels that weigh up to 5 pounds,” said Misener.

Mr. Paul Misener assured that various products that the company sells will be within the 5 pound payload limit so that customers can order tension free. The online retailer is making it on the front pages of newspaper with its objective of delivering products in one day through drone delivery service.

The Seattle based company has been very much occupied to work on this project where it can guarantee its loyal customers of faster deliveries. The Amazon Prime subscribers can now avail this service. The firm has rolled out it in some places of the United States with plans of expanding it across the country.

Alibaba Partners With Agencies, Banks To Finance SMEs

Alibaba Group launches a new initiative to finance SMEs to enable cross border trades easily.

Alibaba Group Holding announced collaboration with 25 banks, financial institutions, and credit rating agencies across the globe. On Wednesday, the Chinese ecommerce company made it official. Its main objective is to allow cross border trade financing for SMEs along with new credit-reporting service. The company took this step as it looks forward to bolster its B2B (business-to-business) ecosystem across the globe by teaming up with offline industries.

Alibaba Group is also currently looking to improve its Online-to-Offline (O2O) services. It initially started as a B2B platform and now it has evolved a lot. It initially was a platform of Chinese suppliers only but now, it is a one-stop platform offering several services to its international buyers and sellers, such as logistics, business services, and business verification services.

The CEO of Alibaba Group, Daniel Zhang, said in a press conference in Hangzhou, “To Alibaba, regardless of B2B exports or imports, the ecosystem is very important. The Alibaba mission is to make it easy to do any type of business.”

The domestic partners for its latest initiative that will be taking care of the finances for all the SMEs, include MYBank (Alibaba-backed internet bank), China Merchants Bank, Bank of China, etc.

As of now, only SMEs that belong to the mainland China are allowed to take loans from this initiative. These loans can be used to further fund cross border trades in the future. The Chinese firm also announced of launching its own credit rating platform this year under domain name of credit.alibaba.com.

The president of B2B business unit at Alibaba, Sophie Wu, said, “By building up the credit profiles of Chinese SMEs based on business-related data, Alibaba.com’s credit reporting service can help overseas buyers identify trustworthy trading partners and provide Chinese suppliers access to innovative financing options.”

The company is significantly growing as the time is passing by. It is regarded as the biggest and largest tech organization in the world, which has all the power to invest in any startup or business. The only disadvantage is that it has little or no presence in the international markets, which may be hampering its progress for global domination. The firm aims to dominate the global retail space but the challenges in expansion specifically in the United States are worrying it.

China represents a significant market with many isolated businesses. Jack Ma clearly understands the potential of international borders to expand and tap into other markets.

Baidu Also Open Sources Its AI Blueprints

Baidu decides to make its AI platform opensources amidst competition.

Baidu, which offers diverse services to the local populace, is following the footsteps of Facebook and Google by open sourcing its artificial intelligence (AI) code. The reason behind this initiative is to become a standard offering in an extremely important market.

The company has come up with Warp-CTC C library that has been posted on GitHub through their lab situated in Silicon Valley. A blog post also motivates the developers to make use of the platform.

CTC is an abbreviation of "connectionist temporal classification." The service uses a bunch of neural network designs that enable them to process the data that is not aligned seamlessly. Thus, it has the ability to decipher complex patterns and in terms of speech recognition, this technology is considered one of a kind.

The Research Labs at Baidu have devised their system by making use of CTC so that it can add more depth to its speech recognition products and services. Speech recognition is an important component for businesses to operate in the Chinese market due to the tonal language. Moreover, it gets hard to incorporate written language on the digital canvas.

Baidu claims that Warp version of its service requires less memory comparatively and can function hundred thousand times better than conventional CTC. The reason for  the company to open source the software is that it wishes to “make end-to-end deep learning easier and faster so researchers can make more rapid progress" along with the fact that "previous code for training end-to-end networks for sequences has been too slow." It wants to "start contributing to the machine learning community by sharing an important piece of code that we created."

The reality behind this decision is that Google announced to open sources its recent TensorFlow Software offered in November. Likewise, Facebook has come up with a similar announcement in December regarding Big Sur. Baidu is now concerned about its efforts since developers will be more inclined to use technology that they are more accustomed.

Artificial Intelligence has become an integral part of online business and can result in immense advantages for operations all over the globe. AI is extremely complex and to achieve objectives successfully, one needs to integrate hardware and software seamlessly. The idea is to offer something perfect or the technology will be obsolete.

The race of ‘IoT’ further fuels ambitions for tech companies. Many organizations are teaming up to make this common dream possible.